


Suzerainity

by DesdemonaKaylose



Series: Banners from the Turrets/The Servant Has No Such Ambition [10]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Captivity, Confrontations, M/M, Potential timeline but not necessarily the true timeline, Read Him For Filth Rung, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2020-01-01 09:06:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18332948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: Timeline Bad Ending:Centuries ago, Megatron lost his spark to a scene of futile, everyday resistance. Starscream always said that Rung would try to leave him someday, but he is not someone who knows how to let go with grace. If he has mistaken keeping for care, who could really say they expected otherwise?This is a beautiful prison, but a prison nonetheless.





	Suzerainity

**Author's Note:**

> Neveralarch and I were talking about potential branches that the Decepticon Rung timeline could follow, and out of three or four options this is the one I absolutely had to write first. Takes place in a future after the [Lake House fic.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18390032) :)c

 

 

 

[Noli me tangere](https://www.google.com/search?q=noli+me+tangere+meaning&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS831US831&oq=noli+me&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j0l5.4643j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8), for Caesar's I am,  
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame. 

_-_ Sir Thomas Wyatt, _Whoso List to Hunt_

 

 

Megatron stepped into the beautiful little apartment, and the endless seething volts of the plasma field closed tight behind him.

Was this what it had felt like for a middle-caste mech to come home to a conjunx? A familiar face waiting in a private room? A homecoming? Long ago on the sun-bright surface of their dead homeworld, he wondered if this had been how the other half lived.

On the sill of the one-way window, beneath the yellow alien skies, three little green organic plants sat neatly in their pots. Their fleshy, water-heavy blooms gave the whole apartment a strangely living, strangely exotic scent.  Megatron disapproved on principle, but this was a gilded cage—the materials with which it was gilded concerned him little. The bonzai crystal growing at its slow, fractal rate; the woven mesh and the luxurious cushions; the workbench on the corner smelling of glue and scattered with shavings of metal, bits of plastic.

Rung looked up. The green-blue glass of his spectacles caught light impassively—his servos settled slowly against the work table.

“Ah,” he said. “Back again, after all.”

Megatron made his way through the room at a leisurely pace, touching odds and ends that caught his eye. He traced an appreciative finger over the stained glass of a lamp, its glowing yellow mosaic shaping out the contours of a spark. He had sourced it himself, of course. He made a point of assessing whatever palaces and galleries his army encountered, before they burned each to the ground. Most of the actually valuable things would end up as incentives for Tarn and the occasional cultured mercenary. The things he was really looking for, those things he knew when he saw.

Rung watched as he caressed the various lovely things, taking stock of the collection. He couldn’t say he cared particularly for any of it, but the message was the thing--the message is always the thing. Rung could accept or discard whatever he liked, but everything in this room was ultimately at the disposal of Megatron.

“Something on your mind?” Rung said, levelly.

“Always,” Megatron replied. A glass bauble gave a soft chime. “Minefields, power games, weapons of war.”

“And how _is_ Starscream,” Rung asked, folding his servos on the desk.

“He’s stopped asking about you,” Megatron said, tapping a mobile in the shape of their home solar system, so that it spun lazily for him. “Once I told him how Tarn reached through your chest and peeled your spark strip by strip like slag off a piece of iron ore, he didn’t ask again.”

“Tarn didn’t do that,” Rung says. “But I suppose you wouldn’t like Starscream to know I’m still alive, after all. You finally have me all to yourself. You must like that.”

Behind Rung, mounted on the wall like an ever-present gallery of witnesses, were the ships. A pitiful wounded fleet, wings and rostra broken like birds; brazen in the display case, all their scattered pieces assembled around them.

Megatron curled his lip at them.

Their hollow-eyed judgement never changed, although it had been a century now since Megatron tore down their shelves and slung the contents across the empty shell of Rung’s abandoned quarters, smashing them to pieces against the walls. Although Rung could have fixed them all several times over by now, with the neat collection of tools that sat even now beneath the plasma charged window. The dust settling from the fist-shaped holes in the walls--the berth ripped up by the bolts and slammed against the floor--the ships remembered all these things.

The house-arrest collar sat dull and silver against Rung’s throat.

“They had me for weeks, you know,” Rung said, fingering the thin band with an almost absent little motion. “You do know that, of course you know. I’m sure you looked over the list of _remonstrations_ at some point. Did you like what they did to my fuel tank? I’ve had worse, but barely.”

Of course the house-arrest inhibitor could have been installed as a chip just as easily. The collar wasn’t strictly necessary. There was no reason for it, except as a reminder.

“And yet,” Rung continued, “I am alive. And everyone knows the DJD don’t let their playthings live.”

Although a reminder for which of them, precisely?

“You could have had me killed,” Rung said. “You could have killed me yourself.”

The plate glass of Rung’s spark chamber burned. Perhaps not a conjunx. Perhaps a pet—a collector’s menagerie of one.

“Do you want to talk about that?” Rung said, in a hard, businesslike voice.

Polished to a gleam, Rung was detailed and aligned and a specimen of health. The scars were hardly visible, even on close inspection.

After the DJD recovered him, one of Rung’s own hand-trained staff had pieced him back together, silent and terrified in the chamber where Megatron left the medic to work. On the table, Rung had lain like one of his shattered model ships: open and blank and surrounded by an orderly inventory of his broke parts. The Justice Division was well skilled in the art of creating the most pain possible without fatality. A competent enough medic--a frightened enough medic--could glue a victim back together as easily as a broken toy.

It needn’t have been that way. Rung shouldn’t have fought them. Megatron had given them specific orders to take Rung alive, with minimal damage. He was a noncombatant, Megatron had assured them; he would surrender with a clear demonstration of force. Exert your dominance, retrieve him, and return him to me. Nowhere in that plan had Megatron anticipated more than token defiance. Rung was reasonable, practical: he would bend to a firm servo.

He’d been wrong, in the end. Rung kept proving him wrong.

“This is an army,” Megatron growled. “We are balanced on the razor edge of victory and you were an _officer._ The usual punishment for defection is death.”

Rung quirked an eyebrow. “Haven’t you always said it’s better to die free than to live a slave?”

Megatron crossed the floor, coming to loom at the edge of Rung’s worktable. He leaned across the desk, splaying his servos over the dust and shavings. With the doctor seated, the difference in their sizes was at its starkest. And still, as Megatron dipped in close, Rung did not retreat.

“Ah,” Megatron said, “But you could do so much more than die. You could suffer. You could plead.”

Rung’s expression remained inscrutable behind his glasses. “And that would bring you satisfaction, would it?”

“You resent me,” Megatron observed. He took hold of Rung’s chin, the tips of his fingers blunt and brutish by comparison. “Perhaps I should have left you with Tarn a while longer. He made a stirring case for why he should be given jurisdiction over you. Quite impassioned.”

“I do have a _fair_ amount of experience with pain,” Rung said, his delicate jaw set tightly in the cage of Megatron’s fingers.

“The Functionists were blunted tools,” Megatron said, leaning in closer. “My soldiers are fine instruments. After a few years of his tender care, you would beg for my forgiveness. You would crawl to me in a trail of your own oil and beg for my leash.”

Rung looked up at him, and in that grim expression there was an echo of something like regret. “No,” Rung said. “I wouldn’t.”

Megatron took his servo back roughly, pushing Rung’s face aside as he let go. For a moment, Rung continued looking at the wall.

“I have been _merciful_ with you,” Megatron said, “up until now. The price of your disobedience--”

“This isn’t a mercy,” Rung cut in, his tone like cold steel, “except for you.”

A dark mood bit at Megatron’s processor.

On the work table, half-assembled, sat a replica of this room. Like all of Rung’s little models, it was being carefully assembled with tweezers and pins. Cultivated frozen domesticity: tiny berths and tiny desks, a life frozen in a single moment for the appreciation of the collector. They used to sit in his office on the Nemesis at times, on rare days—Megatron made the time to do so, because it was part of the process of keeping Rung to his side, and it required so little of him in any case—while Rung worked. A datapad of field reports to scroll through in companionable silence while Rung hummed softly to himself, assembling room after tiny room.

 _I only keep ships I’ve served on,_ Rung told him once.

On the day Rung had begun construction of the Nemesis without fanfare, fierce pride—fierce pleasure—had gripped Megatron in the quiet easiness of that office. His ship. His doctor. His prize.

With the flex of his wrist, he sent the worktable toppling away. The model crashed across the floor, the table bounced and tore a chunk of plaster from the wall.

“Stand up,” Megatron said.

Stiffly, Rung levered himself upright. A dark pleasure seeped up in Megatron’s fuel pump.

“Come here.”

The deliberate steps halted just in front of Megatron, who considered Rung with a voracious silence.  

“There _is_ something on your mind,” Rung observed. “You always come to see me when there’s something on your mind.”

“As I said,” Megatron replied. “There’s always something on my mind. Turn around.”

There was a little shiver of unease, smothered almost the moment it raced through the doctor. Rung steadied himself, and then spun on his heel. His servos hung at his sides, twitching as he fought the urge to ball them into fists.

“I can still taste the heat of you,” Megatron said, taking hold of the back of Rung’s neck. “Let me taste you again.”

“I think I’ve made my position on that very clear,” Rung replied, even as the panels along the length of his spinal strut rippled away from Megatron’s touch. His chin was up; he kept his focus on the far wall.

“I’ve been kept in solitary confinement before,” Megatron murmured, stroking a finger over a flicking antenna. “It must be so quiet here, when I’m away. The sound of your own fuel pump, the rattling in your head. It starts to ache in your struts, doesn’t it? In your spark?” He let his servo trace down Rung’s shoulder. “In your array?”

Rung locked so still that his joints nearly creaked.

After so many late off-shifts in the welcoming cradle of Rung’s arms, in the crux of his open legs, Megatron knew the feeling of Rung’s arousal intimately: the thrum of his charge racing through every conductive line, the whisper of his vents, the electric crackle of static across his spark-glass. The little flick of his antenna.

“You still want me,” Megatron said.

“I’m still attracted to you,” Rung corrected. “You deliberately obscure the difference.”

Charge jumped from bright armor and grounded itself in Megatron’s fingertips as he stroked an audial.

“You still love me,” Megatron said.

There was a dry sound as Rung visibly worked to get words past his intake. “I find it very interesting,” he said, after a moment, “how you always avoided that word when I was free and serving you of my own volition, and yet you’re happy to use it now.”

“You still love me,” Megatron went on, ignoring him, “because you know that I’m right, deep down. You understand that I’m taking care of you, the way I always have. I’m doing this for your own good. If you need to vent your frustrations, I will indulge you.”

Rung turned abruptly, his mouth pressed into an exasperated line. “Of course I still love you,” he said. “I’ve loved you since you spent three days trying to convince me that it was vitally important to my understanding of _Omega Prime_ that I admit Breakwave wanted Omega. I’ve loved you since you wrote me a three page prospectus on why I should allow you to nuke Froid from orbit. I loved you when you were kind and I loved you when you were cruel, and someday I may find it within myself to forgive you, but Megatron I do not trust you, and I will never trust you again.”

For a moment, every bit of cool, certain pleasure Megatron had felt since he stepped into this room flickered, like light dying on a broken screen. What remained beneath, in the dark, was void and glass and something surging desperately, trying to reignite that faulty circuit.

And then the light flicked back on.

“I don’t require your trust,” Megatron said, reaching out, “I only require your obedience.”

He took Rung by the throat and pushed him down against the floor, until the back of his helm was held pressed there. The band of the house arrest collar had a strange, unpleasant texture under his grip; cold where the rest of Rung was warm.

Rung didn’t fight him, he noted with satisfaction. Even after all his moralizing and resistance, Rung’s frame recognized its master. It submitted beautifully as he refamiliarized himself with each delicate joint and gleaming panel.

The metal was hot under his probing fingers. Rung’s hips gave aborted little twitches as his thighs were stroked, his throat flexing under Megatron’s firm servo.

“Open up for me,” Megatron murmured, fingertips sliding over the ball of a hip and across the surface of hotter burning paces.

“You’re unbelievable,” Rung said, his mouth a grim line.

Megatron smirked and dipped in closer, palming the warm modesty cover.

“How long has it been?” he said, his mouth at Rung’s audial as his servo rubbed gently over the closed interface array. “Do you take care of yourself in here, Rung? You know I have surveillance. I could easily find out.”

“That would be a new low for you,” Rung replied, “if I had done, which I have not.”

Megatron let out a low hum of satisfaction. No one had touched Rung since the last time Megatron laid him bare--not Starscream, and not even his own servo. “Let me take care of you,” he said. “Let me remind you how good it feels to be mine.”

Charge rippled across Rung’s frame, nipping at Megatron’s fingers. His fans had kicked on, deep in his chassis somewhere. With his low performance engine they barely whispered, but Megatron knew their sound intimately. And still, Rung watched him impassively, mind refusing to capitulate where frame was more than happy to submit.

Megatron pressed a kiss to Rung’s audial, and then Rung’s jaw, and then to the vulnerable throat in his grip, which flexed involuntarily at the brush of his mouth.

“Haven’t I treated you well?” he said, into the underside of Rung’s jaw.

Rung balled his fists at his sides, staring straight ahead. His frame trembled.

“Despite your ungratefulness,” Megatron said, “haven’t I given you everything you’ve asked for, each time you asked for it? When you had nowhere to go, I gave you a home. When Cybertron discarded you, I took you up. I gave you a title--I gave you a cause--I gave you a place at my table--”

With each item he pressed another kiss to Rung’s throat, feeling the pump of fuel lines underneath his glossa and lips. It was intoxicatingly familiar, the way Rung responded to him. His curves and edges fit into Megatron’s palms as if he were forged to be handled by no one but him.

“I _found_ you,” Megatron said, digging his fingers in. “I took you from that pitiful, crippled practice and I put you at the head of an army. No one else saw what I saw in you. No one saw your value but me, no one saw your _bravery_ , your _dedication--”_

The delicate frame under his servo began to creak with the pressure of his grip. Rung had bitten into his own cheek at some point, trying to hold still and silent. Megatron released him, hovering for a moment before returning his touch more gently. Rung shivered as Megatron caressed him slowly, lingering at seams and joints.

“I can be merciful,” he said, and cupped the panel of Rung’s array in his palm. “You are of more use to me on the flagship than here, rusting away in this cell. Apologize for your petulance. Swear allegiance to me.” His servo slipped up, over Rung’s abdomen, and came to rest over the crackling glass of his spark chamber. “Take my brand.”

Megatron’s engine purred in his chassis as charge bit up from the glass into his servo, climbing and clawing at him as if Rung’s very spark was inviting him to touch. Rung twitched, and then turned his head away.

“Obey me,” Megtron said, stroking the glass with his thumb, “ _serve_ me--and I will be your slave.”

Rung made a tight little sound, his chest flexing as if he was trying not to arch. Megatron knew what Rung liked. He liked to be held tightly and touched slowly, to be attended to, to be cared for. He liked to be treated like something rare and precious, licked into like a delicacy, cossetted and savored.

There were others who had not treated Rung with such care, and Megatron was determined to remind his faithless servant who was the better option. On his own, who knew what new sort of master would find him? This galaxy was no place for a lone noncombatant. There was a war on, after all.

Megatron sat back and took Rung by the thighs, pushing him over the floor until his interface array was level with Megatron’s face. It was hardly a difficult thing to hold his legs open, parted wide, despite how Rung strained to close them. Megatron lowered his head and licked over Rung’s modesty panel, tasting the lubricant that leaked through the imperfect seal. The fragile thighs trembled in his servos.  

“Open up for me,” Megatron said again, looking up from the lubricant-slick juncture of thigh and panel, and sucked gently at the sensitive seam.

“Get--slagged--” Rung gasped.

“Open up for me,” Megatron said, “and I’ll open up for you. Wouldn’t you like that? To be inside me again?”

The arch and jump of Rung’s hips was more answer than the glitch of his strained, muffled voice. Megatron smirked to himself, relaxing into the satisfied certainty that he would have his way sooner or later, and that was why he did not see the next move coming.

Instead of trying to close his legs, Rung drew them back--which Megatron allowed, taking it for an invitation to continue--and then Rung kicked forward, slamming the heels of his pedes into Megatron’s throat. Shock whited out the world for half a second, long enough for Rung to slip his grip and topple him in one vicious shove. When Megatron rolled back against the floor Rung swung up atop him, his small fist punching through the weak place in Megatron’s armor left by his most recent scrape with Prime.

Megatron froze, his reaching fingers suspended between them, as the wires in his chest sparked and shouted warnings at the tug of Rung’s servo. If he pulled those out, Megatron’s system would crash. Just for a moment, just until self-triage could open up new pathways around them, but long enough for any number of things to happen in the environment of a prison cell.

“You should know by now,” Rung said, voice low and hard, “that even the biggest and strongest opponent still has weak spots. Put your servo down.”

Megatron looked up into the round, impassive blanks of Rung’s glasses. He allowed his servo to drop.

It was unlikely that Rung could do anything to Megatron that would stop him from returning the blow tenfold. The wire damage would barely take a second to rectify. Even if Rung ripped it all out now, Megatron could still catch his helm in one fist and crack it like so much decorative glass before the reboot even kicked in.

“Yes,” Rung said. “You could kill me now. I’m well aware of it. Would you like to try? Would that bring you pleasure?”

Megatron’s servo twitched against the floor. The ache in his throat where Rung kicked him was nothing, the lowest type of priority flag in his sensor net, but the awareness of it--of Rung staring down at him, holding him at bay--

“Do you know why you still come here to see me?” Rung said. Wire sparked in his grip. “It’s not because you want me to grovel and fall in line.”

Every component of Megatron’s frame felt strangely sensitized, disorienting in its demand for more touch, more stimulus. There was a warm pulsing, hard to ignore, where Rung’s fist rested inside of him.

“I’m the only one who will tell you _no_ ,” Rung said. In the golden fire of the afternoon he burned atop Megatron, deliberate and self possessed. “I’m the only one who will tell you the truth. And you want the truth. You _do_.”

The quickness of his fuel pump, aware and alight with electricity, demanded processor space that ought to have been allocated to any number of other considerations.

“When you’re on your throne, with all your soldiers around you--when you’re standing on a battlefield streaked with dead mech’s oil, and you hear that little voice in your spark, telling you that it’s all gone too far? I want you to listen to that. I want you to feel the wind from that abyss you stand over, and I want you to think of me.”

Rung’s modesty panel snapped open, revealing the glittering swell of his valve. The light of his anterior node fairly _burned_ , so hot with charge that just looking at it was painful. As Rung shoved two fingers inside of himself, he dropped forward on Megatron’s chassis, holding himself up with the arm still clutching bare and stripped components.

“Don’t touch me,” Rung whispered. “I’m not yours.”

 


End file.
